Executive Summery

Women empowerment in education is key to improving rural productivity, employability and

income-earning opportunities, enhancing food security and promoting environmentally
sustainable rural development and livelihoods. Despite rural women’s major role in agriculture
and other rural activities, higher barriers in education and training limit their capacity to
engage in more productive and remunerative work, perform decision-making and leadership
roles and participate fully in the development of their communities. This situation animates the
present policy brief to propose the effective measures and targeted action to address these
barriers. This Policy Brief is based on the findings of a research that was conducted in kapete
rural community in chongwe district that suggested the need for the Zambian government and
relevant stakeholders to devise, implement, and partner to provide training programmes for
community education support. This should be aimed at providing education support to illiterate
women in rural communities. In this regard, community based interventions should be devised
and strengthened so that communities are involved in addressing illiteracy among rural women.

CONTEXT OF THE PROBLEM

Education and training are powerful tools against poverty and hunger, and for women’s
empowerment. Educated women are more likely to be healthier, have higher earnings and
exercise greater decision-making power within the household. They are also more likely to
ensure that their own children are educated, thus breaking the cycle of poverty and hunger in the
country. Evidence from Asia suggests that better education enables rural women to find high-
paying non-farm employment, whereas a lack of education tends to limit their choices to
agricultural and low-wage non-farm employment. From a developmental perspective, investing
in women’s education has the highest rate of return of any possible investment in developing
countries: educated mothers have fewer children and are also more likely to send them to school,
thereby raising the productivity of future generations, increasing their income, and generating
sustainable growth.

Illiteracy and poverty are two sides of the same coin. Poverty is associated with poor or lack of
access to vital basic resources such as health, education, shelter and food. Unemployment, which
has a gendered and spatial quality to it, is one of the causes of poverty. The highest percentage of
the illiterate, poor and unemployed is found in women living in rural areas. Lack of literacy
means lack of skills, which result in lack of employment. The engagement of women in literacy
programmes will enable them to be functionally literate, to improve their family lives, and
community well-being. Literacy will develop rural women to enjoy the opportunities that
education brings, such as living safer, healthier, more productive and more fulfilling lives.
Women will learn to analyze their life situations in order to reach out new skills and knowledge
systems, which may have remained dormant for years. It is through literacy that women may be
engaged in income-generating skills.

Although literacy is a basic human right and can lay the foundation for further education and
training, there is still a high number of illiterate people in rural Zambia. Rural women form the
majority of non-literates in the country and this has a negative impact on the development of the
country. This means that rural women are still marginalized and stay in conditions of squalor
because they are unemployed, poor and lack skills required by the labor market. The high
unemployment rate among women in rural areas suggests that these women are hardest hit by
poverty, perhaps as a result of lack of basic education which results in them lacking basic skills.
In order to address the problems of illiteracy, unemployment, poor health and the low standards
of living, women have first to be empowered though literacy programmes.

NEED FOR ACTION

Education and training are essential components of any strategy to improve agricultural and non-
farm productivity and pull households out of poverty. Learning about improved production
technologies and methods, new products and markets, business skills, as well as life skills (such
as health management, decision-making, self-confidence, or conflict management) can make a
big difference in rural women’s lives. Skills development is particularly important to rural
women; who are more likely to be contributing family workers, subsistence farmers or
homebased micro-entrepreneurs in the informal sector, or performing low-paid, unskilled work
as seasonal workers. Women often have different training needs than men, linked to their
domestic work and care responsibilities, as well as to gender-based division of labor for
managing or undertaking specific tasks in crop, livestock or fish production and processing.
However, the following issues have continued to affect the empowerment of rural women in
education.

1. Gender biases in education and training start early and accumulate

  Although primary and secondary school enrolment has improved significantly for rural
girls in many Zambia, they generally continue to suffer disadvantages in access that tend
to accumulate throughout their lives as basic education is often a prerequisite for further
skills development. Thus, women receive less vocational training than men.

2. Social, cultural and economic constraints limit rural women’s education and training

 Negative attitudes towards the benefits of educating girls and lower priority for girls’
education, especially if women’s remuneration is lower than men’s and employment
opportunities are scarce. In addition, girls are seen as relatively “transitory assets’’ not
worthy of long-term investment as they leave their parents’ household upon marriage.
 Long distances to school’s/training institutions and lack of public transport.
 Lack of safe and accessible boarding, and sanitary facilities in school’s/training
institutions.
 High education and training fees, while women generally have little cash of their own
and limited bargaining power to access household money for training.
 Education and training curricula and delivery ill-adapted to women’s learning needs.

3. Lower work status traps women in a vicious circle with limited development perspectives

• Rural women’s limited access to productive resources, lower educational levels, and
social norms about appropriate work for women, tend to confine them to lower paid,
lower status work where opportunities for skills training and thus advancement are
reduced, thus perpetuating their lower status.
• Widespread patterns of insecure employment relations and contractual arrangements in
many rural enterprises, such as temporary, precarious jobs, do not encourage employers
to offer training to women.
• Vocational education and training for rural women are often limited to a narrow range of
female-dominated fields that reinforce their traditional roles and responsibilities. While
this may improve their income-generating opportunities, it will not give them the chance
to benefit from newer, nontraditional fields, such as information and communication
technologies (ICT).

4. New challenges require more creative, gender-balanced approaches

  Environmental degradation and climate change pose threats to subsistence farming and
call for new technologies, alternative crops or growing processes which demand new
skills. Evidence suggests that climate change affects women and men differently and their
skills needs may thus also differ.

POLICY OPTIONS

Skills development for rural women and men often requires a combination of training in formal
settings (such as schools and training institutions), non-formal settings (such as community
groups and NGOs) and informal ones (such as learning from family or peers). It can comprise
basic education, vocational training, life skills training, entrepreneurship training, and
agricultural extension services. Policy makers should aim at designing and implementing a
package of complementary measures to address the specific needs of each category of rural
individuals. These include the following policy options:

1. Ensure a targeted education and training strategy

• Develop a gender-responsive strategy for education, training and entrepreneurship

development that responds to the needs of rural girls and women (following ILO’s
Recommendation concerning Human Resources Development: Education, Training and
Lifelong Learning No. 195 - 2004).
• Set clear objectives, use indicators and establish evaluation mechanisms to plan and
assess the education and training programmes for rural people.
• Collect sex-disaggregated statistics and qualitative data on rural and urban women and
men in education and skills training to improve programme design and evaluate progress.
• Conduct gender-sensitive analyses of economic opportunities and assessments of the
related skills needed, and ensure that rural skills development activities take into account
the local socio-economic context.

2. Stimulate participation in basic education with gender-sensitive approaches

Extend girls’ participation in free, quality basic education on an equal basis with boys by
promoting a gender-responsive learning environment, which includes:

• Safe school facilities and separate sanitation facilities; safe and gender friendly transport
to schools and/or building of schools in strategic locations near underserved areas.
• School times and hours that allow for seasonal agricultural or household work.
 • Incentives for teachers to work in rural areas, including female teachers. Legislation
and/or school rules against sexual harassment, and gender awareness training for
teachers.
• Improved curricula that respond to rural realities, such as combining agricultural training
with conventional subjects. The Junior Farmer Field and Life School in Mozambique, for
instance, has its own learning field where pupils grow vegetables. This “local
curriculum” activity improves diets by introducing new vegetables to the community and
teaches children practical skills.
• Information, to raise parents’ awareness about the importance of educating girls and
financial incentives (such as vouchers), and/or non-financial incentives (such as meals at
school, take-home rations) for families of school children.
• Involvement of families and communities in planning and managing local education and
schooling so they better meet the needs of the boys and girls, their families and their
communities.
• Reduced gender stereotyping in curricula to improve the classroom environment and
particularly to “dismantle” stereotyped profiles of rural women and men that reinforce
inequality and inequity in households and the world of work.

3. Increase participation in gender adapted technical and vocational education and training

• Increase the quality and quantity of gender-responsive vocational education and training
institutions in rural areas.
• Support, design and deliver gender responsive community-based training initiatives,
including skills training in employment-intensive infrastructure programmes, especially
in areas lacking formal educational institutions.
• Develop targeted strategies to allow rural women to access formal and non-formal
vocational education and training. These include:

– Reducing financial barriers for rural women to access skills training (for example, through
stipends).

– Considering issues of timing and location of training, and developing flexible curricula
that fit rural women’s needs.

– Increasing the number of women trainers and agricultural extension workers, and
providing gender awareness training to trainers and other staff of training institutions
 (including on issues related to sexual harassment and to gender stereotypes in households
and the world of work).

– Providing infrastructure support and facilities, including accommodation, safe and

female-friendly transport facilities, childcare services and tool kits.

– Developing curricula that match rural women’s needs. Take into account the different
kinds of indigenous knowledge and skills they have, and complement them with up-to-
date knowledge and technology.

– Raising awareness among rural women, their families/communities, and training

institutions, about the benefit of training women in non-traditional trades, in using new
technologies, and in traditionally male occupations.

– Developing gender-sensitive delivery mechanisms that match rural women’s and men’s
different needs, such as mobile training units, extension schemes and distance learning
using mobile phones, radio and internet.

– Designing interventions to include women who are the most disadvantaged (such as
women with disabilities, from ethnic minorities, associated with armed forces or ex-
combatants).

• Expand rural women’s access to science and technical education and ICT, such as mobile
phones and computers, to facilitate their access to quality education and training, such as
distance learning.
• Encourage girls to study technical subjects, for example, through scholarships.
• Complement vocational and technical training with numeracy and literacy training for
rural women who need it. Women, particularly the most disadvantaged, may also need
training on gender issues and life skills, such as health and nutrition, confidence building,
negotiation and leadership skills.
• Link women with mentors/masters via apprenticeship systems. Upgrade traditional and
informal apprenticeship systems by improving working conditions or combining
apprenticeship with formal vocational training or links with business associations.

4. Support women’s self-employment

 • Combine technical and entrepreneurship training, for example through community-based
initiatives, as many rural women make a living through self-employment.
• Strengthen the capacity of entrepreneurship service providers to better address the needs
and potentialities of rural female entrepreneurs.
• Provide post-training services such as access to credit or savings programmes, business
development services, training in product design and marketing, and linkages to new
markets. New markets, especially value chains, can also provide opportunities to adopt
new technologies and production practices.
• Support rural women’s networks and groups, such as cooperatives. Groups can lead to
informal learning of skills and provide the collective power that may be required to reach
new markets.

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on analysis of the aforementioned experiences and developments, the following

recommendations for concrete action to be taken by facilitators, educators, providers of literacy
programmes, and local and national governments may be formulated:

• The Zambian government and relevant stakeholders should devise and implement
sensitization and education programmes on the dangers of illiteracy among women. More
so, the government and relevant stakeholders should partner to provide training
programmes for community education support. This should be aimed at providing
education support to illiterate women in rural communities. In this regard, community
based interventions should be devised and strengthened so that communities are involved
in addressing illiteracy among rural women.
• To improve on the enrolment of illiterate adults in literacy programmes, recruitment
strategies should be intensified by all engaged in adult education. Various mobilization
agents can be used, for example, the church, community forums, schools, political
meetings, door-to-door campaigns, pamphlets and the governing bodies of schools.

• Facilitators should be trained to develop specific empowering learning strategies linked

to opportunities for progression within lifelong learning systems.

• Small-step progression that creates routes towards empowerment and change, as well as
opportunities for the recognition of non-formally acquired knowledge and skills, should
be part of such strategies.
• Learning providers should assess, analyze and remove barriers to women’s participation
in learning. For this purpose, they should carry out research and needs assessments, use
the media, and work with community leaders, influencers and families to gain their
support.

• The involvement of men is a key requirement for successful change processes.

• It is critical to design learning opportunities that are relevant, attractive and motivational
to women. This means that women need to be involved in the design, planning, review
and evaluation of literacy learning. This also requires the professional development of
programme providers and educators.

• The training of facilitators should include understanding of issues related to gender

equality, creative empowerment strategies for men and women, skills to negotiate with
existing power structures, community influencers and organizations to support change.

• National and local governments should develop policies from a lifelong learning
perspective, to empower women through literacy learning and further learning
opportunities. In doing so, they must listen to women, their needs and their stories.